Ouroboros
by Selena
Summary: New lives and old guilt. Past and present collide when Connor encounters the Furies. Sandman crossover.
1. There ought to be a play

Disclaimer: Connor and all things AtS owned by Mutant Enemy, Lyta Hall and assorted _Sandman_ characters owned by Neil Gaiman and Vertigo.  
  
Timeline: Post-_Not Fade Away_ for Angel; post-_The Wake_ and _The Furies_ for _Sandman.  
_  
Spoilers: For all of AtS and the entire _Sandman_ saga, plus Mike Carey's _The Furies_.  
  
Thanks to: HonorH for beta-reading, and for insisting this story ought to be written. It's for you.

* * *

Connor wasn't sure what he had expected to find. He hadn't been sure he wanted to look for Cordelia at all, or how he felt about her. He remembered kissing her the first time as surely and intensely as he remembered kissing Tracy. He remembered that Cordelia tended to have cold feet and was always hogging the covers, which was different from Tracy or the other encounters which might or might not have happened in the life he had chosen. He remembered Cordelia teasing him about being eighteen, and her brown sparkling eyes and wide, wide smile, which made you feel you were swept up in that radiance which was hers.  
  
He remembered her telling him to kill.  
  
Cordelia hadn't been at Wolfram & Hart, and Connor didn't want to go back there to ask what had happened to her. So it took him a while to find out, and he had to bribe the most computer-savvy of his friends with the promise of writing an entire essay for him.  
  
(Writing with a computer. Two memories, again; learning how to type at age 14, from his dad; learning from Fred at age 18, during that summer when one of his fathers was dead and the other buried under the ocean. Watching Fred's thin, skilful fingers fly over the board; watching Dad's heavy, burly ones demonstrate. Thinking this wasn't any more difficult than mastering a new weapon; thinking that this was annoying and that they should invent computers that took dictation already.)  
  
When he found out Cordelia had died in her coma, he went very still, so still that his friend actually grabbed his wrist to feel his pulse. She had been someone from a dream, he told himself; not real, less real than any of the others, because so much of what she said to him he now knew to have been lies. But he still remembered the taste of her lips, and the way her hand felt when she stroked his hair, and that he had promised to keep her safe.  
  
Asking where she was buried was almost an afterthought. He didn't really believe there would be anything of hers left, anything that would tell him why she had done what she did, and in none of his memories, not a single one, there was an example of visiting a burial place bringing peace. He never had returned to the spot where he and Justine had lain Daniel Holtz to rest; his father wasn't there any more, his body purified by fire and the ashes dispensed in the wind.  
  
(In his other memories, the ones he decided were the real ones, there was not a single death. Even his grandparents were all still alive, and he and Mercy never had been allowed to keep pets.)  
  
When he heard Cordelia was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica, he didn't go there at first, either. It would only serve to make the wrong memories more real. Then Angel showed up again, and everything was real once more anyway. It was the strangest, saddest and happiest day he had experienced in any of his lives. He left the city as he had promised, but kept listening to the radio all the time. When there were no reports of massacres or Los Angeles being destroyed, he tried to discover what had become of Angel and the others, and found no trace of them.  
  
Ending up at Woodlawn Cemetery was probably as much about them as it was about Cordelia; he wanted to say goodbye to _somebody_. It was a warm, sunny day, and the mist, which usually didn't vanish until it was nearly noon, had already risen early in the morning when Connor arrived at Santa Monica. He found her tombstone without difficulties. It wasn't as if there were many other people visiting the cemetery, or as if it was even that big. In fact, the only other visitor he spotted was a slim woman in faded jeans with hair so bright that he couldn't be sure whether it was blond or white, who looked rather uncertain. He was on the verge of asking her if he could help when he located Cordelia's grave. It was strange to see the dates and to realise Cordy had been so young. In other circumstances, she could have been at college, only a few years ahead of him.  
  
There was a quote from Wordsworth under her name. "_She was a phantom of delight_". Connor wondered whether Angel or Wesley had ordered this, and how whoever gave him his real life had managed to include all the data qualifying him for a college education, including British poetry.  
  
Staring at her name, he waited for either rage or loss to hit him, or the emptiness that had swallowed up everything else in the end, before it was cut through with a knife at his throat. Instead, he felt confused. There was the name, Cordelia Chase, and he still could not understand what he had been to her, or she to him.  
  
"Kinslayer," said a voice next to him.  
  
Connor whirled around, and another voice in the back of his head, a low, gravelly voice sounding like it belonged to Holtz, told him that in the other life nobody would ever have managed to come that close to him without being noticed. Mistakes like that could get you killed in Quortoth.  
  
There stood the woman with the white-ish hair. That close, he could see tiny lines in her face; she was in her late thirties, perhaps even older. Or perhaps it was the echo of the word she had spoken, that harsh, single word, that made her appear older. The hairs on his arms rose. There was something utterly and completely inhuman in her, and yet he didn't get the sense she was a demon, let alone a vampire. She stared at him, with the long tendrils of her hair curling around her neck like white snakes, and he remembered seeing Jasmine for the first time, in her bright, green glory.  
  
"No," he whispered.  
  
The cold, unforgiving glare wavered. The woman blinked, and suddenly she was nothing more than a woman on a hot summer day, looking tired, lost and bewildered. The horrible thing was that he was familiar with that expression as well. He had seen it on two faces melding into one, that day when he spilled the blood that allowed Jasmine to be born.  
  
"Shit," she said. "I thought I..."  
  
He didn't want to hear anymore. Connor turned and ran away.

* * *

That night, he had a dream. He was back in the Hyperion, going down to the basement where they had locked up Angelus, his heart pounding with a strange mixture of hate and desire. This, at last, would be the monster he had been waiting for. His father.  
  
There was the cage, but it was empty. Three women stood in front of it, veiled, so he couldn't see their faces, and when one of them pointed at him, the others laughed.  
  
"There you are, dearie," said the one who had hear arm outstretched, and her voice, the voice he had last heard begging for his help and speaking of love and trust, was Jasmine's. "So you've met the vessel at last."  
  
"We've been waiting for you," said the woman in the middle, and he knew her voice as Cordelia's.  
  
"What, did you think we wouldn't remember?" said the third, and her voice belonged to a stranger. This was unexpected, and suddenly he didn't feel frozen on the spot anymore. As fast as he could, he moved towards her and tore the veil off her face.  
  
It was a girl's face, young and innocent, and it took him a horrible second to remember who she was, so much had he expected her to look like the woman in white who had claimed to have been his mother.  
  
"I begged you let me go," said the girl. "And you tied me up like an animal. You slaughtered me. Why did you never try to find out whether I got a burial, Connor? Why is it that you got another chance, but I did not?"  
  
"You promised to keep me safe," said Cordelia, and when he looked at her he saw that she had torn back her veil on her own. "You made me give birth to that abomination. I was screaming inside all the time, Connor, and you made me into the instrument that brought forth Jasmine. And then you let me die."  
  
The third woman grabbed his hand, and her own was covered in maggots, as it had always been. She was older than anything existing on Earth. She had lived for little more than a month.  
  
"I loved you," she said. "I love you still. Let me show you, as you showed me."  
  
"You're dead," he shouted desperately. "All of you are dead!"  
  
They laughed. "What, you don't like these masks?" said the thing that sounded like Jasmine. "And you've always been so fond of masks, Connor. Just like your father. Both of them."  
  
"You spilled the blood of your daughter, boy," added the woman in the middle, sounding less like Cordelia now and more like the stranger at the cemetery in the morning had done, with every word as barren and unforgiving as the rocks of the world where he had grown up. "That makes you our prey."  
  
"Who are you?" he asked, swallowing a protest that he was a hunter and no- one's prey. Hadn't he decided that the hunt was not for him any longer, that it was to be put aside together with the memories of blood and pain and conflicting passions that tore him apart?  
  
The girl-shaped thing laughed. "Really, Stephen, you ought to know," she said, imitating the cadences Daniel Holtz had used when trying to make a point. "So many names they gave us through the ages, so many nasty names. What, have you been raised by vengeance and not been told about the Kindly Ones?"  
  
At last, he managed to pull his hand away, but he could still feel the maggots crawling up his flesh.  
  
"That was in another life," he replied defiantly. "You have no power over me now."  
  
"We'll see," the middle one said, and he woke up.  
  
Looking at his wrist, he found it covered by insect bites.

* * *

"And you're sure?" Pauline asked, staring at the woman pacing up and down in her apartment.  
  
"Positive," Lyta replied, looking anything but. Her face was ashen, and her fists clenched. "This is bad, Paul," she continued. "I haven't felt... it wasn't this strong since..."  
  
Pauline quickly rose from her couch and went to the fridge in the corner to get herself something to drink. She and Lyta didn't talk very often about the time when they had met, or what Pauline had watched Lyta do. They both had scars that went pretty deep, Pauline thought, and there was no need to poke at them on a regular basis. But Lyta knew things about her no one else did, and Pauline supposed the reverse was true as well. Certainly Lyta would have ended up in an asylum for the insane if she would have tried to explain to anyone else about channelling ancient deities.  
  
"I thought that was over," Pauline said, ostensibly still hunting for the Diet Coke she knew wasn't there which enabled her to avoid looking at Lyta. "I thought you could, well, control them now."  
  
"Nobody controls them," Lyta replied. "They can't be controlled. But they can be bargained with, and I thought... well, I thought we had come to terms. And then there was the boy, when I was visiting Carla's grave. I saw him and I _knew_, and they rode me again."  
  
Pauline gave up pretending and went to Lyta, tentatively putting her hand on Lyta's shoulder. It wasn't something she did very often; Lyta wasn't comfortable with being touched unexpectedly.  
  
"But you pushed them back," she said quietly. "You didn't do anything to that kid, right? It's over."  
  
"That kid is a killer," Lyta said distantly. She didn't move away, but she might have been on the other side of the planet. Her skin felt cold under Pauline's touch, and her eyes had the emptiness of a desert sky in them. Pauline let her hand drop.  
  
"Maybe," she said. "Maybe someone asked him to." Like me, she didn't say, but Lyta knew what she meant anyway. Pauline's father had begged her to help him die, and she had born her guilt and resentment until Lyta had confronted her with it out of the blue, one night in Athens when nothing made sense anymore.  
  
Lyta's eyes focused on her, and she lost something of that frightening distance.  
  
"Not like that," she said gently.  
  
"So what did he do?" Pauline asked, grateful that they didn't have to go there again. Restlessly, Lyta began pacing again, until she suddenly fell on her knees, as if someone had punched her in the stomach. Her shoulders shook, and she buried her face in her hands. Pauline couldn't decide whether Lyta was laughing or crying.  
  
Then Lyta looked up again. There were no tears in her face, and no trace of mirth.  
  
"He slew one of the powers that shaped the universe," she said, very clearly, as if pronouncing a judgement. Pauline could see that Lyta's fingernails had left tiny crescent moons on her forehead. "And yet he created her as well. Do you know what that feels like, Pauline? I do. I **do**. And it seems someone has decided it's time I paid for it." 


	2. Second Acts

One could rationalize what had happened, of course. Psychosomatic symptoms, thought the son of Colleen and Lawrence Riley, who intended to take psychology classes at Stanford in addition to his other subjects; brought forth by visiting Cordelia's grave. The white-haired woman probably had been in distress herself and not even been talking to him, had, in all likelihood, been as creeped out by him as he was by her. The nightmare was just that, a nightmare. Dreams had no power in real life unless you gave it to them, and well-adjusted, sensible young men would never fall into that trap.  
  
The son of Daniel Holtz thought that was nonsense. Any time something threatened you, you should better track it down at once and eliminate it before it got the chance to carry out its threats.  
  
Angel's son thought he should have expected this, and accept whatever punishment fate was intending to inflict. It wasn't as if he didn't deserve it.  
  
Connor found himself wandering for an entire day. Los Angeles wasn't suited to this kind of activity and never had been; he nearly got run over by a car no fewer than five times, and once or twice even got offered a lift. Then there were the propositions and the mugging attempts, but he didn't count those.  
  
Ultimately, he found himself in front of a church that looked vaguely familiar. When he noticed the door looked much newer than the rest of the building, as if it had been added or restored only recently, he guessed where he was and entered. But the air was stale and had been refiltered a thousand times in the last year. There was no trace of Cordelia there anymore, none at all.  
  
His parents were non-practising Episcopalians who were quite happy with visiting services only at Christmas and on Easter. Connor didn't have any strong feelings about religion either way, and didn't remember any formal prayers beyond the Our Father from his happy Californian childhood, as opposed to the lyrics of the Flipper theme tune. Quortoth memories were different. Holtz had been a Catholic and had taught him how to pray a rosary in English and Latin, with wooden pearls he had carved himself pressed between his fingers.  
  
He also recalled the prayers and hymns written to Jasmine by her admirers last year, and Angel teaching him how to sing what used to be called _Mandy_ to her.  
  
Sitting down in one of the back rows, Connor rubbed his right wrist. It wasn't necessary; the bites had faded, far too quickly for any human flesh. He tried to remember about being stung by insects as a child, and how fast that had healed, and whether his parents had noticed something odd, and found he couldn't think of a single instance, which was unlikely. Obviously, someone had not been completely logical with his memories. The 101 in Greek mythology, on the other hand, was tops. There had not been any need to look up whom he had dreamed about. The Kindly Ones. Eumenides. The Erinnyae. The Furies.  
  
He wasn't even surprised when the door of the church opened again, and a female shape appeared, dark against the light flooding in. What did surprise him was the identity of the voice he heard, for it did not belong to the woman he had somehow expected. Nor did it belong to the faces his nightly visitors had borrowed. It was a lazy drawl he hadn't heard since the days the sun had been gone and darkness had reigned over the Los Angeles.  
  
"Well, well, well," Lilah Morgan said, "if it isn't the boy wonder."  
  
The last time he had seen her, she had been a dead body bleeding on the floor of the Hyperion, and he had demanded that they should behead her in case Angelus had made her into his own. Something in him wondered whether Wolfram and Hart had the power to resurrect everyone who had ever signed a contract with them, and if so, whether that included Angel and the others. Then he told himself it did not matter; Angel wasn't dead, except in the most technical of terms. He couldn't be.  
  
"Miss Morgan," Connor said politely, with the manners that his other lifetime had taught him, and just the faintest trace of sarcasm, "you're looking great for a corpse."  
  
"So are you," she said, striding towards him until she stood in front of him. She leaned forward and touched his neck with her left hand, drawing a circle around his throat. "How about a little bonding over getting your throat cut?"  
  
Before he could stop himself, he had not just slapped her hand aside but had her pinned to the next column. Then he froze. It had been an instinctive reaction, which didn't belong to him anymore. She noticed his hesitation and smirked when he let her go.  
  
"How about telling me what you want?" he said, trying to cover the slow rise of panic in him. Fighting that Schwarzenegger clone to help Angel had been one thing, but if it wasn't to help anyone or save his own life, he didn't want any of it back. "That woman yesterday works for you, doesn't she?" he continued, relieved to have figured it out.  
  
She laughed, sounding not malicious but genuinely amused. This close to her, he smelled the lifelessness on her, which was quite different from a vampire's. Vampires might be moving corpses, but they existed, they were individuals, they were covered with traces of blood and sweat of other people and whatever nest they chose to inhabit. Lilah Morgan smelled of nothing but formaldehyde. There wasn't even perfume to cover it up, and nothing to distinguish her from any other body that had gone through the expert hands of those specialists preventing human flesh from rotting. She was as attractive as she had ever been, but he couldn't help feeling vaguely repelled by her in a way he had never been by Jasmine's true form.  
  
"For me? Darling, I couldn't afford her. Especially now that the Senior Partners have to reestablish their base in these parts. No, I'm afraid the ones who've got it in for you are the Furies. She's their vessel. Such a pity that Daddy isn't around to protect you anymore, hm?"  
  
"I don't need protection," Connor replied automatically, determined not to give her an opening in regards to Angel. He tried to figure out what her game was.  
  
"Ah," said Lilah Morgan, "but what about that wonderful sweet new family of yours?"  
  
He grew cold.  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"Brush up your Euripides," she returned. "This is how the Furies operate. They don't attack their prey directly; they take everything from him that makes his life worth living, bit by bit, and drive him into madness and despair. Sounds familiar? But of course," she added, smiling sweetly, "the one who had the fun relationship with madness and despair was old Connor. New Connor is such a nice boy, and he'd better be, because the firm paid quite a lot of money for it. Which leaves just a tiny little problem."  
  
"That there is no reason why I should believe someone with your great reputation for honesty and helpfulness?" he suggested while the urge to strangle her grew almost unbearable. She had to be lying. She simply had to be. He recalled the slaughtered family they had found when tracking the Beast, and nearly threw up when imagining Mom and Dad and Mercy in their place.  
  
"Can nice Connor take out Lyta Hall?" Lilah continued, blithely, as if he had never interrupted her. "Because that's about the only way you can get the Ladies off your back for a while. Kill the mortal vessel they draw the power to manifest from. They'll have to find a new one, and that could take years. But then... sacrifice a human to save your family? Of course _you_'d never do such a thing."  
  
The silent church seemed to swallow her laughter as he turned his back to her and tried his best not to run the entire way home at once. He would be sensible and call his parents as soon as he got out of here, and they'd be perfectly fine. Because anything else was impossible.

* * *

It had taken Lyta a while to find out where the boy lived. She could have relied purely on instinct and let the Ladies guide her, but that would have meant giving up any control she had left, and she wasn't planning on doing that.  
  
She knew so much and so little about him. Just what he had done had come to her in a flash, and in rich detail, because so much of it was so familiar. The emptiness, the rage, the despair. Even the will to throw oneself into madness, because nothing else made sense anymore.  
  
But she only knew his name because it had been spoken in the memory of the event, and she didn't know how he had managed to entangle himself in such a web to begin with. He seemed so young. So very young. Of course, age meant nothing. She tried not to imagine Daniel as a teenager and failed.  
  
The old pain was still there and would never go away, but these days the thought of her son was mingled with some trace of comfort as well, as faint, fleeting but still existing as the kiss he had placed on her forehead. No matter what he had said, their last encounter had proven to her that there was something of Daniel left in the entity he had become, and it was enough to allow her to continue with her life.  
  
Still, she couldn't forget she had failed to protect her child when Daniel had needed her most, and that her subsequent actions had ensured his fate. Watching the young kinslayer, Connor, standing before a grave, had been like looking in a mirror again, showing both herself and the child she had lost. Not that this mattered to the Ladies. But it mattered to Lyta. She had to talk to him before any of this could be allowed to continue.  
  
_We're not in the rescue business_, they whispered in her. _We told you before_.  
  
_We'll see_, she thought, and went to the one person in Los Angeles common sense told her to avoid, the one person who could possibly provide her with some explanations. The woman who had called herself Larissa when Lyta had last seen her was unchanged; the decade that had passed had left no trace. She still had the same mousy brown hair, she still wore the same huge glasses and non-descript clothes. Her carefully cultivated mild-mannered air, however, vanished as soon as she recognized Lyta.  
  
"I told you that a lot of people would want to kill you for what you did," she said, with every syllable dripping in ice. "Including me. That has not changed. What do you want?"  
  
There was a lot Lyta could have replied. Most of which revolved around the statement that Larissa had been crucial in making her actions possible and was in no position to condemn them. But that wouldn't have helped. Besides, she wasn't the confused mess of madness and despair she had been the last time.  
  
"You cut a deal with the Ladies once," she said instead. Larissa's face showed no reaction.  
  
"I did."  
  
"Cut another deal now," Lyta said. "There are things I need to find out."  
  
Another long moment of silence passed between them, thick with things unsaid. Then Larissa inclined her head, and stated, without aggression and in that matter-of-fact way in which she said most things:  
  
"But you are not here on the Ladies' business here now, are you? So what can you offer me? Aside from some physical strength, you have no power of your own, and I don't need a bodyguard."  
  
"Oh, I can always be used as an instrument," Lyta said, with a bitterness she did not have to feign and trying to project a confidence she didn't really feel right now. "Cronus tried to use me that way. He wanted to make me spill family blood, so the Ladies would be forced to devour themselves and he could take their place."  
  
"I heard," Larissa commented, and her eyes behind the thick glasses she presumably didn't even need betrayed just the tiniest flicker of interest.  
  
"Then perhaps you also heard how it ended. That bastard is in Hades now, where nothing ever changes. But nature abhors a vacuum, and so does power, am I right, Larissa?"  
  
With a shrug, Larissa stepped aside, which for her passed as an invitation to enter her apartment. It was rather Spartan; shelves and shelves of books, and white walls, but no pictures, posters or even a radio. The small kitchen corner was spotlessly clean. The only items even vaguely frivolous were a mirror with a silver frame and some scented candles on some of the shelves. The couch in the middle of the room, incongruously, was covered with patterns of psychedelic flowers. One could only conclude that the previous owner of the apartment must have left it here. Gesturing her to sit down, Larissa said:  
  
"I've gone back to Thessaly these days. But continue."  
  
"Cronus ruled time and change. When you made your bargain with the Ladies, you wanted more life. But if you took Cronus' place, you wouldn't have to petition anyone to prolong your immortality anymore. You could deal out your own time."  
  
Larissa returned from an expedition to the kitchen corner with a tea pot and two cups. Given that it was a hot summer day, the idea of tea had something absurd to it, but Lyta accepted it nonetheless.  
  
"Gods aren't exactly living the good life these days," Larissa said, "without worshippers. Or vessels, for that matter. But you're right, there was some inherent power to Cronus which, in theory, is up for grabs now. What makes you think you could help me to gain it?"  
  
Leaning back, Lyta permitted herself a small smile.  
  
"That's for me to know and for you to find out. _After_ you've helped me."  
  
Then she took a small sip from the tea. To her surprise, it turned out to be quite good; not black tea, but something tasting like oranges mixed with strawberries and a third fruit she couldn't identify.  
  
"Tell me what you want," Larissa said, "and we'll see whether something can be arranged."  
  
After Lyta had finished her explanation, Larissa gave her a look as if to ask why Lyta didn't just do the simple thing and let the Ladies deal with the boy, whose guilt, after all, was not in question. But she didn't say anything. Instead, she prepared a bowl, filled it with water and informed Lyta that she needed some of Lyta's blood for a proper scrying. Lyta tensed; the way Cronus had used her blood had almost gotten Pauline killed. But then, she had known that dealing with the last of the Thessalian witches carried a great risk with it before she had arrived here. So she allowed Larissa to take a few drops. Something in her expected the Ladies to protest, but all she could feel from them was a clenched sensation of waiting.  
  
When Larissa was done, she pursed her lips and declared:  
  
"Someone has gone to a great deal of trouble. For starters, your boy didn't attract the attention of the Ladies just by coincidence. They were called, and you of all people should know how difficult that is. Secondly, there is a series of spells on him that bear Cyvus Veil's mark. Veil was an old show- off, but he knew his business, and he was a major player. One thing he couldn't be called was sloppy. So I have to wonder why these spells are disintegrating. Thirdly, that boy shouldn't exist at all. His parents, his true parents, should never have been capable of producing a child. As long as he lives, he'll continue to cause ripples in the fabric of existence."  
  
She took a paper and quickly wrote down an address.  
  
"That's where he lives. And if you want my advice, which you should, then let the Ladies do their business."  
  
"Thanks," Lyta said drily, pocketed the note and got up again. She wondered why Larissa didn't insist that she now deliver the information on how to get what remained of Cronus' power until she saw Larissa's somewhat smug expression.  
  
"Since the Changer poisoned you and created life from your blood, your blood can be used to trace the power that was his by someone with the necessary skills," Larissa said with the patience a school teacher had with a somewhat slow student. "Thank you for providing it."  
  
Lyta had assumed that she would have to go to Greece with Larissa, to the places where Cronus had manifested, and felt foolish. Well, their bargain was concluded in any case, and she could not claim Larissa had not delivered. After crossing the threshold of the door, she turned around once more, and, following an impulse she only half understood, said:  
  
"He has forgiven you, you know. After all, he forgave me."  
  
"And why should I be interested in forgiveness?" Larissa returned coldly, and the door closed in Lyta's face.

* * *

His mother had sounded fine on the phone, but Connor couldn't stop running all the various scenarios in which a voice could be faked through his head. Some of them didn't even involve magic. So he borrowed a friend's car and drove home, all the while practising harmless explanations, which his parents would hopefully buy. If they were all right.  
  
The first thing he noticed was that someone else's car was parked outside, a car he didn't recognize, a dusty old Toyota. He didn't even bother with the keys but stormed into the house, kicking the door open, only to find both of his parents looking at him with great consternation. Which would be fine, except the white-haired woman whom Lilah Morgan had called Lyta Hall was standing there as well, like a new arrival who hadn't quite settled in yet. At this point, sensible young Master Riley gave way to Stephen, who yelled:  
  
"Stay away from them!"  
  
"Connor!" his mother exclaimed, shocked.  
  
"Look," Lyta Hall said, "we've got to talk and you need to..."  
  
"No, you do," he said, forcing himself not to rush at her. "You need to go. You need to leave my parents alone."  
  
Her eyes narrowed, and suddenly the air in the room seemed to crackle with electricity. This time, he could feel it happening, the surge of power in her which drowned out any other element. With each word hammered and shaped like a flintstone knife aiming at his heart, she said.  
  
"They are not your parents, kinslayer."  
  
"Now wait a minute," his father protested.  
  
"This boy is not of your blood," the woman said. "But he did spill it. Every day he lives with you is nourished by the dead body of your daughter."  
  
"You are insane," his mother whispered. "Connor would never harm Mercy."  
  
The words fell like rocks from a mountain, burying him beneath them. He tried to say the same thing, but his throat hardly allowed him to breathe.  
  
"You had two daughters. That is why they chose you. Because your eldest daughter was captured and sacrificed by him to give birth to his own. They chose you for the jest of it, and took the memory of your daughter, and replaced it with what never was."  
  
_No_, Connor wanted to scream, _no, that isn't true. It's a lie. It's a dream. Something that never happened. She's a liar, she is mad, can't you see?  
_  
Another part of him wanted to say that he had not known. That once his memories were returned, he had not even wondered which family Wolfram & Hart had placed him with, and why, because he did not want to know. Because he loved them.  
  
But what came out of his mouth was a single syllable. "Why?" he said tonelessly. The woman's face tightened, and he could see the small muscles in her cheeks and chin moving in a silent struggle.  
  
"No matter," she hissed, "it was done, and is done, and shall be done. We are not..."  
  
Then she broke off. The sense of menace she exuded drained away, and she looked at him, human once more and utterly horrified. By now, however, he hardly noticed her anymore. His parents were staring at him, and he could feel how desperately they needed him to tell them that this woman was a lunatic who should be put in a straight jacket and taken to the nearest hospital. He opened his mouth to tell them just this, and closed it again.  
  
The girl. The girl whose name he still did not know, the girl who had died because of him. She had been their daughter, and that same spell that gave him the memories of a happy childhood and their unconditional love had taken every memory they had of her. Of the happiness and unconditional love that had belonged to her.  
  
He had taken her life, twice over, and the fact he hadn't known about it the second time didn't make it any less wrong.  
  
_I'm sorry_, he wanted to say. _Forgive me. That was not me, at least not the me you know. The me I knew, until a few weeks ago, when I remembered again.  
_  
But that would not bring their daughter back, not her life, not her memory.  
  
"Get... get out," his father said, with his voice broken like glass that had been irrevocably shattered. Later, it occurred to Connor he might have meant Lyta Hall, but in his current state, he took it as judgement.  
  
_I love you_, Angel said in his mind, returned against all the odds from the cold, empty sea. _Now get out_.  
  
His mother said nothing. Nothing at all. Her face was a complete blank slate.  
  
_You're not my mother_, he said to the woman in white, and she replied: _I have her memories.  
_  
Slowly, each step taking something of his life away, he moved to the door. It wasn't until he was outside again that he noticed that the white-haired woman had gone with him.  
  
"I'm sorry," she said. "Believe it or not, I came here because I didn't want that to happen. I just wanted to talk to you so we could find a way to stop it. I should have known they were simply waiting for their opportunity."  
  
What remained of his self control broke, and he lashed out at her. The first, vicious blow caught her unprepared, but then she blocked him, and he started to fight in earnest. He hadn't encountered a human with that kind of strength since Faith, and at another time, he would have asked her whether she was a Slayer and welcomed the chance to spar. Now, wave after wave of horror and self-loathing caught him and pushed him against her, and he didn't even know whether he wanted to kill her for what she had done, or whether he wanted her to finish the job and kill him.  
  
There was only one way to find out. 


	3. The Kindly Ones

Pauline couldn't believe her eyes when she saw Lyta, looking like someone had used her as a punching bag, drag an unconscious boy out of her car who looked even worse. Lyta had called her and said she needed help, had told her to meet her at her apartment, but by the looks of it, Lyta should have asked for a ride to the hospital instead. She said as much when Lyta carried the boy inside.  
  
"Too many questions," Lyta said briefly, then collapsed on the sofa. While cleaning up Lyta and the boy and dispensing band aids galore kept Pauline busy, she couldn't help but wonder whether she shouldn't ignore Lyta's wishes and call the police in addition to a doctor. All the talk about gods and powers and the other weird shit that seemed to dog Lyta's footsteps didn't change fact Lyta had just come to blows with what appeared to be an adolescent psychopath. Feeling sorry for the kid was one thing; but surely he would be better off with professional help, where he couldn't do any more damage?  
  
Then she remembered how much help the professionals had been with her father, and what they would do if they ever found out, and kept her mouth shut. Her disapproval must have manifested on her face nonetheless, as Lyta said:  
  
"He's my responsibility, Pauline."  
  
Watching Lyta watch the boy as he lay on the couch, Pauline said softly:  
  
"You never did tell me how your son died. You didn't... I mean, you did not..."  
  
She faltered, feeling ashamed and yet afraid of what she might hear. There were several photos of Lyta's son Daniel around; an adorable curly-haired toddler, and that was all that could be told from them. Lyta still kept some of his cloths, and his old bed, but his death was a subject they had steered clear from. Pauline only knew that Lyta had had some kind of mental breakdown afterwards because Lyta had told her when they first met, years later.  
  
"No," Lyta replied, with her voice hoarse, still looking at the boy. "But I might as well have. I thought he was dead, I thought I was avenging his death, and when I was done with my revenge, he had become..."  
  
She stopped, as the boy regained consciousness. His eyes snapped open abruptly. For a moment, he looked confused at the two of them. Then his expression changed to horror. Pauline, who assumed this was directed at Lyta, waited for Lyta to explain, but instead, Lyta just looked back at him, silently. Finally, the boy said:  
  
"Why didn't you kill me?"  
  
"Because that wouldn't have changed anything for you," Lyta returned. "What do you think would have happened to you after your death if you had died attacking an imago of the Ladies? They would have taken you with them, and believe me, I've been there, and it's worse."  
  
The boy sat up, gingerly.  
  
"How can it possibly be worse?" he asked bitterly.  
  
"You could ask your parents' daughter," Lyta said, face impassive. With a shiver, Pauline recalled how Lyta had called her a patricide and told her she would be scourged. That was the thing with Lyta; it was sometimes hard to tell who was talking, and if Pauline had not seen with her own eyes how Lyta fought against monsters, if she hadn't been dragged into the impossible together with Lyta by a creature calling himself a god, she would have classified Lyta as a schizophrenic years ago.  
  
The boy's face shifted again; something of anger left, but the horror remained.  
  
"What was her name?" he asked quietly.  
  
Lyta shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "That's not how it works. It comes in fragments to me, mostly images and emotions. _They_ know everything, of course, but they don't tell me."  
  
She gave him the glass of water Pauline had poured her five minutes ago, and to Pauline's surprise, the boy accepted it. He drank in slow, considerate sips, like someone who had experience with this kind of situation, so much experience that it had become instinct not to be greedy.  
  
Finally, he put the glass down.  
  
"I have to find out," he said. "And not just her name. I have to restore those memories to Mom and Dad. And Mercy." He flinched as he said the last name. "She wasn't there when you arrived, was she?"  
  
"No," Lyta said. "But she might start to remember anyway, just like your parents. Larissa said the spells around you were starting to unravel. She also said someone had called on the Ladies and pointed them in your direction. You have an enemy, Connor, and apparently one who thinks he can use me as well. I've been used before that way, twice, and I'm sick of it. So tell me, who knows what you have done and knows enough about the powers that shape this world to conjure the Kindly Ones?"  
  
"It doesn't really matter, does it?" he returned, with something of the temper he had displayed earlier returning. "Everything you've said is true. They're still all dead because of me, and I can't bring them back. Any of them. Not the girl, and not my...do you really think I care who brought it up again?"  
  
Professional help sounded like an attractive prospect again, and not just for Connor. Pauline froze when Lyta grabbed the boy by his shoulders and hissed:  
  
"Don't you give up. Don't you dare."  
  
"You don't know..." he began, and she interrupted him, digging her fingers deeper into his shoulder. Pauline didn't understand why he didn't move away.  
  
"I had a family once," Lyta said, and a passion burst from her which Pauline had never observed from her friend, "and we were happy together. But we were not living in the real world. We were living in dreams, and dreams are treacherous. _He_ came and destroyed them, and then I had nothing but my son, and _he_ vowed he would claim him one day. They burned my son, do you understand, they burned him and I thought he was dead, and then I didn't think anything anymore. I gave myself to the Ladies, and we tore _his_ realm apart. You think you are a murderer? I killed everyone and everything in that world, and I didn't care, just as long as _he_ suffered and died in the end. And I got my wish. Oh, did I ever. I saw my son turn into the thing I hated most, and now they are one, and it is my fault. So don't you tell me what I know."  
  
The boy stared at her, transfixed, doubt and comprehension mingling with a sudden need in his face.  
  
"But how do you go on after something like this?" he whispered.  
  
Lyta let him go, and regained something of her composure while Pauline felt torn between the urge to hug her and the wish to slap her for burying something like this in silence for such a long time.  
  
"You try," Lyta said, sounding tired and worn out. "You just – try. It took me years, but then I finally could do what he wanted me to do when I saw him again. Pick up my life. I'm still trying."  
  
The boy got up, but made no move to leave. Instead, he began wandering through the room, restless, slightly limping, now and then stopping to look at the photos of Lyta's child and her dead husband, or at the Greek mask Pauline had given to Lyta and which now hung from the wall.  
  
"I do remember my parents visiting Disneyland with me," he said, "except it must have been with her. I remember someone spilling orange juice all over me, except I never knew oranges existed until years later. I remember her blood on my hands, and that it was my choice. And that was just the first death. Jasmine killed hundreds, you know. Not because she hated them. She devoured them because she needed their energy. I knew she was doing it. The others, they loved her because she made them love her, they had no choice about it, and so they didn't protest, but I always... I knew what she was doing, and I loved her anyway."  
  
Pauline had been visiting Florida at the time, but she still remembered the news about a charismatic cult leader named Jasmine. She recalled waiting to watch the broadcast during which Jasmine would address the world, with a mixture of incredulous disgust at the thought of the fuss raised by some religious freaks and the tiny nervous hope that Jasmine might really be the genuine article. When Jasmine had started to speak, she had felt the overwhelming love and peace exuding from the woman in an instant, and then it had all fallen apart as some horrible creature was revealed.  
  
"She was my daughter," Connor continued, "mine and Cordy's. And she was a monster. She killed more people in the few weeks of her life than all the monsters I ever fought, and I loved her, and I helped her, and when she died, when I finally killed her, I couldn't feel anything anymore. Anything at all."  
  
"Flesh is the food of the earth's justice," Lyta said, in that infinite voice that was not her own. "Blood shedding its own blood calls the judgement of the earth. We shall ride you to the land of the death, and there we will ride your ghost forever."  
  
Then she abruptly said, sounding like herself again: "But you let Pauline go. You did not scourge anyone but Cronus these recent years, and I know we met more than one who has shed family blood. You will be with this boy, one way or the other, in any case. His life of dreams is destroyed. Why not let him live, let him try to make amends?"  
  
Pauline caught her breath. The eternal sceptic in her told her there was nobody here but two very unstable people and herself, but she could remember the monsters, and the mad run to escape from them, and the dead body of her lover pinned up like an ancient sacrifice. The boy, for his part, seemed to have no doubts whatsoever. He knelt down in front of Lyta.  
  
"I think," he said hesitatingly, "I think we already went this way together once, you and I. You were with me that day in the mall, weren't you, Ladies? If I have to die again, let it be now, here, where nobody else gets hurt."  
  
Lyta clenched her fists; violent shivers shook her entire body, as if she was trying to contain another birth. Finally, she exhaled, a deep, shuddering sigh. Then she said:  
  
"They're considering. But someone did call on them, and that hate and thirst for vengeance is feeding them. We'll have to find out who it is if you want to live."  
  
She looked at him, stretching out her hands.  
  
"Do you?"  
  
He remained immobile, and Pauline wondered what she would do if she saw Lyta, possessed or not, start to kill another human being. Try and stop her, she supposed; and knew she would fail.  
  
"I'll try," said the boy, took Lyta's hands and rose, and the relief that shot through Pauline made her dizzy for a moment.  
  
Lyta smiled at him, a shaky, uncertain smile; only now did Pauline notice that her friend must have bitten her lips. There was blood on them. Silently, she fetched two more glasses of water for both of them. After Lyta had thanked her, Pauline addressed the boy, attempting to sound as if this was every day business.  
  
"So who do you think is after you?"  
  
Connor frowned. The name he eventually said meant nothing to her, but that was nothing new; aside from Jasmine, nearly every name, term or occurrence mentioned today had been bewildering or terrifying or both.  
  
"I could be wrong, of course," Connor added. "But I know where we'll find out." 


	4. Last Rites

The Hyperion beckoned with its dark, outsized splendour. Connor had not been here since he had started his frantic search for Cordelia. Back then, it had been full of Jasmine's worshippers and their happy chatter, flooded with light and full of the colours Lorne had ordered to provide Jasmine with appropriately divine décor.  
  
All those colours were gone now, not faded but replaced with determinedly polished ebony furniture and red carpets. This clinched it, and so he was no longer surprised when he smelled formaldehyde.  
  
"Seems juggling two sets of memories has improved your mental faculties," Lilah Morgan said from where Angel's office used to be. She leaned on the doorframe and regarded him and Lyta with her lazy, amused look. "I was expecting you to go to the office."  
  
"But this is the office now, isn't it?" Connor returned. "The other place is just something where glass and steel are reconstructed, and they'll need more than a year before they finish. And I was thinking about what you did to Mom and Dad. Substituting me for their daughter. You'd want such a switch for your new base – you gave Angel the old building, and took his home."  
  
"It does have a certain elegance, don't you think?" Lilah agreed. "And I did die here, so I am somewhat attached to the place. After all the disasters with their other employees, the Senior Partners finally listened to my suggestions." She smiled at him. "Who says Wolfram and Hart doesn't reward loyalty?"  
  
He could hear his own heart beat, and Lyta's. The air was full with the sterile, chemical stench of an untertaker's residence; it seemed as epitomize the perversity of Wolfram and Hart. As confused and unhappy as he had been here, this had been something of a home once. When he had lived with Fred and Gunn here, he had scorned them for their attachment to Angel yet had come to listen for their steps in the night, their laughing, noisy attempts at cooking, even their worried nagging about his absences. In retrospect, he knew this had been the first time he had lived with something like a family. After Angel banished him, he kept returning in secret, until he found Cordelia. The Hyperion might never have been the content paradise the Rileys lived in, but it had been a home to people trying to do good things nonetheless, and seeing Wolfram and Hart absorb it, just as they had taken everything else from Angel and the others, awakened an anger in Connor that had nothing to do with his own guilt.  
  
"It's not her," Lyta said in a low voice, and startled, he looked at her. She was watching Lilah with a slight frown; her body was tense, but there was no sign of the Ladies' presence. Lilah inclined her head.  
  
"Ah, the infamous Ms. Hall. No, Connor, I didn't call the Furies. Mind you, I did get a kick out of the idea. Your darling daughter and her mother cut my throat, your mother was a complete bitch who killed a bunch of my colleagues once and made me beg for mercy, your father was a self-righteous bastard who locked me up with her and later had the nerve to lecture me about morality, and his last stunt at playing the hero got the only man I ever loved killed, so seeing his little boy hounded to madness and death? Is a perk. But I'm a lawyer first and foremost. I arrange things, I represent. Care to guess whom?"  
  
"The Senior Partners," he said, anger rising. "That's nothing new."  
  
"Not in this particular case, or rather, we've taken another client. Bad guess, no cookie. Guess again."  
  
"Why don't you quit the games and tell us?" Lyta said harshly. "You might be dead, but the rest of us still have a life to live. Stop wasting our time."  
  
"Funny that you speak of time," Lilah replied, now positively purring, "but you'll have to wait a bit longer to be let in on the joke. Excuse me for a moment."  
  
She vanished into Angel's office. Connor could hear her talk on the phone, telling someone to come down. There was no reply; some moments later, a door opened and shut somewhere in the third floor. Then the elevator, the machine that had baffled him in his first days and which Gunn had often complained about because it was such a bitch to repair, started moving.  
  
The familiar scent hit him a few seconds before the doors of the elevator opened and he saw her. He had held her hand when she was three and frightened at her first day at kindergarten. He had pulled her braids, he had told her stories, he had been teased mercilessly by her about the first girl he crushed on.  
  
Only none of that had ever happened at all. Not to him.  
  
Out of the elevator, white-faced and heart racing, stepped Mercy. His little sister.  
  
"Am I good at recruiting angry teenage girls or what?" asked Lilah smugly.  
  
Mercy stared at Connor. "I didn't know it was you at first," she said, tonelessly. "But I did start to remember Grace, after Mom and Dad had gone to Wolfram and Hart with you. Only nobody else remembered her, and I had to find out. So I went to Wolfram and Hart as well."  
  
Her eyes, carrying accusations of betrayal like fish caught in a net of violent rage, were her sister's eyes, staring up at him. Were Jasmine's eyes. He could feel himself falling, falling, like he had done when the Beast had thrown him out of the window effortlessly, only this time there was no ground to stop anything anymore.  
  
Then Lyta put her hands on his shoulder, and said to Mercy:  
  
"Revenge is your right. But it will leave you dry and empty and will return nothing to you. Believe me, I know. The Ladies are offering you the chance I never had. You can be satisfied with what you have already. He's paying; believe me, he's paying, and your sister will haunt him till the end of time, but he's still there. You don't have to destroy him."  
  
Lilah clapped her hand together, once, twice, three times, each time sounding as she fired a bullet in the still, sterile air.  
  
"Such laudable sentiments," she said. "It must be the aura of this hotel – brings out pretentious speeches from everyone as if Angel were still there. Well, Ms. Hall, you don't have to mourn your own fate anymore. Now if Wonder Boy had killed you, this wouldn't be necessary, but the Senior Partners have decided to consider the expense anyway and make you a truly generous offer. You see, our sweet Mercy here has volunteered to become the next vessel of the Furies, since you seem somewhat reluctant to carry out their will. As an added bonus, they throw in one of our patented memory wipes. Think about it. You want your husband and your son back? Well, why not. Wonder Boy's little girl Jasmine orphaned enough families for us to pick and choose from."  
  
"Mercy," Connor said desperately, "Mercy, don't do this. Look, if you want me to go to jail, I will. If you want me to jump from this building, I will. But don't be a part of her sick game. Don't become a killer."  
  
She crossed her arms, looking absurdly like she had done when his mother had told her she couldn't stay up till midnight. "Not like you, you mean," she replied. "And I don't want to see you dead, you bastard. I want to see you suffer. Do you know, I can't even be sure Grace liked Bon Jovi because you do as well?"  
  
He knew, then, what Angel must have felt that day when he and Justine had put him into a coffin. But if he was Angel then, Mercy must not be allowed to become Connor. Maybe none of the memories he had of her were his, save for the last year, but he loved her. He couldn't let her be sacrificed to the horror of the past as well. Mom and Dad couldn't lose her as well.  
  
"Lyta..." he began. Lyta interrupted him. Addressing Lilah, she said contemptuously: "Do you really think the power of the Ladies is yours to deal and dispense with? We were ancient when the Wolf, the Ram and the Hart still begged for crumbs from the table of the Old Ones, woman. We chose the vessel, and it is not that girl." Almost without a break, she added: "And I don't want your fake memories."  
  
"What about the genuine article then?" Lilah returned.  
  
For the first time, Lyta looked startled. "What do you mean?" she asked warily. Lilah clicked her tongue.  
  
"While the Senior Partners might be momentarily weakened in this dimension, they do have other resources, everywhere. There are dozens of dimensions, and hundreds of worlds, Ms. Hall. There is even one where you did not go on a date that night, and your son was never abducted. Do you understand what that means?"  
  
She smiled to see the colour drain from Lyta's face. Only then did Connor notice that Lyta still had her hands on his shoulders; he could feel them tremble.  
  
"_Everything_ there is as it should be. Your son is still human, still a child, and still with you. True, there is still the potential in him, but this time, you'd know. You'd know far better than the Lyta of that world does. Your son needs you, Ms. Hall. Will you fail him a second time? Or will you let us make another switch? I'm sure the Ladies could be persuaded to accept a new vessel _then_."  
  
Lyta's hands fell away, and Connor turned around. He saw her crying, silently, desperately, and thought, with a numb ache spreading through every fibre of his being: _That's it. She will accept the deal. How can she not?  
_  
Then he looked at Mercy, whose eyes wandered between Lyta and Lilah, confused, unhappy, but determined to go through with something she couldn't possibly comprehend. _There is always a choice_, whispered the voice of his mother in him, or maybe it was three voices, all sounding as one.  
  
"I'll make the necessary preparations then," said Lilah with a self- satisfied victory surrounding her like another elegant costume.  
  
They had called him the Destroyer once. But he could choose what to destroy. He was done with letting others make the choice for him, and with standing by while destruction took place.  
  
Connor whirled and with a single blow smashed Lilah's skull. He heard Mercy's outcry; Lyta did not react at all. Lilah crumpled as Jasmine had done, and for a moment, he was standing in that street again. Then reality reasserted itself, and he knew he had to act fast. The mass of bones and brain matter on the floor continued to twitch; it would not be long before it reassembled itself. Hastily, he pulled out the knife he had procured before they came to the Hyperion, and with the long practice of a lifetime spent flaying animals began to cut.  
  
Behind him, he could hear retching noises, and then Lyta's voice murmuring something to Mercy. He noticed Lilah didn't bleed; the preservation fluids in her had replaced everything else. Feeling the skin part under his fingers, he felt a spark of gratitude at all the various rituals he had been forced to look up together with the others during the reign of the Beast. He wouldn't have remembered, either, if Lyta had not mentioned the Thessalian witch earlier.  
  
_Thessaly_, whispered Fred's voice in his mind, _where the witches gnaw the skin off men's faces for their spells.  
_  
When he had finished, Lilah's face and her tongue were nailed to the wall. "You bastard," she said, a distorted, tortured voice.  
  
"Tell Mercy that this is what her life would have been like," Connor said, surprised by the pang of pity he felt for Lilah. "Tell Lyta there is no dimension with her son human, that you only wanted her to give up her connection with the Ladies so you could use Mercy as your assassin."  
  
It wasn't really important whether he guessed correctly; he knew from the books that Lilah would have no choice now but to do everything he had ordered her to do, and this was about Mercy and Lyta.  
  
Dully, Lilah repeated his words. Only now did Connor permit himself to look at Mercy. There was no hate in her face anymore, but what had replaced it wasn't much better. She regarded him with the horror of facing some unnatural abomination. Well, if this stopped her from thinking alliances with Wolfram and Hart, let alone volunteering to carry ancient gods, would help her in any way to deal with her grief, it was worth it.  
  
"I'm sorry," he said, and meant so much more than he could possibly express. Mercy wiped her mouth from the traces of spittle that were still clinging there, glanced at the wall and rushed out of the hotel.  
  
"It is over," Lyta, who didn't look much better than he felt, said softly. "She does not burn with it anymore, and the Ladies are content with what they achieved."  
  
"There is one more thing," Connor said, and the part of him that was the son of Lawrence and Colleen Riley, who was toying with the idea of becoming a vegetarian, finally caught up with him and threatened to make his stomach turn.  
  
"My father... one of them... told me a legend once. About the Kindly Ones, and how they could open the earth and make it swallow a sinner for good."  
  
"I thought you wanted to live," she said.  
  
Slowly, carefully, he took Lilah's face from the wall.  
  
"But she doesn't," Connor said. "Her Senior Partners own her, like a puppet. And they'd continue to use her, even as she is now. She did say the truth, you know; Jasmine and Cordelia killed her. If nothing else, I owe her peace."  
  
Looking down to the floor where Lilah's body lay, he added: "And I owe it to the house as well. So much happened here, so much suffering; it is drunk and full with it. It shouldn't be used anymore, not by anyone, and especially not by them."  
  
"I'll ask them," Lyta said, and when she closed her eyes, he realized her tears had not stopped until now.  
  
An hour later, Los Angels experienced a very minor earthquake. There were no lives lost, and hardly any property damage. All the more surprising, thought the people in the neighbourhood of the Hyperion when they returned to their homes, that the old hotel, which had withstood so many decades, was finally gone.

* * *

Third Street in Santa Monica bustled with tourists, musicians and locals; by anyone's standards, it was a beautiful, achingly normal summer day. Lyta sat beneath the hedges cut to resemble dinosaurs, and listened to someone playing the guitar for a while. Then she told the boy sitting next to her, who was silently eating the ice cream she had bought him:  
  
"I failed, you know. I failed you. I would have taken her offer."  
  
She forced herself to look at him. Like herself, he still wore bruises, but they had already begun to fade.  
  
"I thought I was stronger than this, but I..."  
  
He put the ice cream away, and to her surprise took her hand.  
  
"You saved my life," he said. "You really did. And I think you saved Mercy. Lilah would have given her some other means to take revenge if you didn't exist, and then my parents would have lost her as well."  
  
"You should talk to your parents," Lyta said hesitatingly. "Not now, perhaps, but after some time has passed. When they have had the chance to grieve for their daughter, and to adjust their memories."  
  
He didn't say anything, but she thought she spotted a flicker of hope in his blue eyes. Gently, she squeezed his fingers and then let his hand go. They continued to sit in companionable silence for a while, and she wondered whether this was actually peace.  
  
"You never told me your son's name," he said, out of the blue, sounding like a young boy again. "His name," she repeated, and then replied, feeling the familiar sadness but also, strangely, pride: "Daniel. His name was Daniel. But that was when he was human. Now, he is Dream of the Endless. Oneiros, the Lord Shaper."  
  
When Connor, spontaneously, with widened eyes and without a moment's hesitation, whistled and exclaimed "wow", only to look deeply embarrassed a second later, she felt a faint smile creeping up and knew that healing had, indeed, begun.  
  
For both of them. 


End file.
